A survey of those who have lost a significant amount of weight and have kept it off for over a year showed that one of the common practises of this successful group of people was that they exercised. They did at least 30 minutes each day and many did more.

People who have lost a great deal of weight have body set points that are higher than normal. This means the body has a tendency to regain weight very quickly. Exercising daily means that extra calorie intake is dealt with before the body can convert it to fat.

Combined with the practices of daily weighing and eating habitually the same food amounts, daily exercise becomes the safeguard to control unforeseen blow outs. If the scales show an upward trend or there is an unexpected disruption to regular eating plan (ie work outing/birthday etc) then daily exercise can be increased in order to keep things under control.

Towards the pointy end of your weight loss journey there is a good chance that somewhere along the line extra snacking became a problem. Your mind plays the trick of saying that you are eating healthy but slowly and surely you find that you are eating too many snacks. That extra snacking blows your calorie allotment and before you know it, its inhibiting your weight loss. Extra calories is extra calories whether it is from healthy food or "bad" food.

The same sort of thing can occur in maintenance. Because your calorie intake isn't as limited on maintenance as it is in weight loss your snacking can increase to such an extent that it can kneecap your maintenance. Always keep in check your snacking. Pay particular attention to it if suddenly you are struggling to stay in your set range limits. You will find that usually snacking is the reason and that it has increased without you being aware of it.

It is easy in maintenance just to cruise along on minimal exercise. Routine is simple and predictable. If you have X amount of food intake and do Y amount of exercise then you'll have Z result. This is true enough for what it is but doesn't allow for the negative affects of doing the same exercise routinely.

The problem with routine exercise is that the body is very good at adapting itself to run as efficiently as possible. For example, if you daily do an hour bike ride your body will build and strength those muscle groups that are used. Pretty soon that hour circuit on the bike that you do is no longer getting you sweaty and working you hard so you end up burning less calories. Worse still, other muscles you use to use are wasting away (lessening) and as a result you are overall less fit than you were.

Mixing and varying your exercise will keep all your muscle groups active and keep you in tip top fitness as well. You goal in maintenance isn't just to keep the calories at bay (and weight down) but to keep your fitness up so as to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

The biggest enemy you will have in maintenance is complacency.You need to counter-act that by developing a real sense of urgency about the state of your weight.Hopefully this is something that you have already cultivated during your weight loss journey. People often comment to me that I lost a lot of weight quickly (true for the most part except the last two months). My reply was that I was in a bit of a hurry as I had a lot of weight to lose.For most of the weight loss journey I had a visual image of death chasing me down the street...nothing like a strong image of that sort to get you moving and develop a sense of urgency about it.

Over 35 years ago I attended an evening gospel meeting at an Aboriginal mission. In that intense wonderful meeting a teenage girl came up to the front to share. Others had shared but this one was very different. She had run to the front from the back of the room crying all the way. With tears streaming down her face she said, "Don't fool with God!" and then related her story...

Her family were packing for a holiday and she spied her little brother putting in his Bible into his bag. She derided him saying that they were only going away for the weekend so why was he taking it along as he wouldn't use it. He replied defiantly that he NEEDED IT! And then she dropped the bombshell. They had been driving along, stopped for fuel and a drink. She and her brother had swapped seats. Down the road they were in a horrible car crash and her brother died. She then sobbed to us "He was ready to die. He read his Bible and knew God - I wasn't. Don't ever fool with God!"

So why am I relating this story? Her brother had a urgency about the state of his soul...he needed his Bible and could not do without it. She developed an urgency about her soul because of her brother's death. I didn't tell you this story to evangelise you but to illustrate that this same *life or death* urgency is what you need to develop in order to keep complacency at bay.

Is there a food that no matter how hard you try you just can't seem to have a controlled moderate serve of? Some foods that have a "all or nothing" grip on us and no matter how we try we always cave in and surrender to it's pull. Usually you will find the reason for it is that the food has a deep strong emotional connections for you. In a sense you aren't just eating that particular food, you are also partaking in emotional memories that can date back to your earliest childhood. No wonder these foods have such a pull on our psyche. And no wonder they are so hard to control.

The best way to deal with these kinds of foods is to simple not go there in the first place. If bite is too much and a feast of it isn't enough then abstinence is the best policy.

Thought 20If we want everything to remain as it is, everything must change.“The Leopard” by Giuseppe di Lampedusa.

In order to maintain our weight we must be prepared to embrace changes. Our lifestyle is not a static thing and there are times when we have to adapt our practises and routines to suit our lifestyle.

This means that we must always be flexible to circumstances and figure the best way forward. If your practise, for example, is to exercise at 8am and suddenly that is no longer possible due to household or job changes then it is for you to find another time that will fit.

Some of these changes may be permanent or long term while others may be one off events. Going out to a restaurant and eating later than you would normally like is one such event. To cope with this means rearranging what you would eat normally and when. It also may also require you to do extra exercise or change your exercise time.

Your healthy new lifestyle is a living thing and to maintain it successfully you will have to find flexibility and change as needed to stay the course.

In maintenance mode your food intake doesn’t have to be as strict as it was during weight loss. After all, in weight loss the idea was to create a deficit between calories consumed and calories used. Now you are trying just to balance the ledger.

So the occasional food treat can be partaken. However what must be kept in mind is that these treats are not a licence for gluttony. Treats are luxuries and ought to be treated as such (that is why they are called ‘treats’). Moderation in all food should always be our practice.

Your weight loss journey has probably sorted out for you what are real food treats.Things that you really do want to indulge in and things that are just passing fancy. The abstinence of these kinds of foods with our restricted calorie intake has given you distance. Enough to figure out what you can live without and what you would like as an occasional moderate treat.

In the tale of Aladdin, he finds a genie and is given three wishes. If he had been granted unlimited wishes I’m sure he would have wished for all sorts of trivial things. But he was given only three so he had to carefully and wisely pick what he wished for. This is like us. Our treats are not unlimited so we must pick carefully and with wisdom too.

Thought 22Don't beat up on yourself if you slip up.Just pick yourself up, dust yourself off and continue on.

We are all human and no matter how hard we try there will be times when we fail. When those times occur we must ride the storm and then continue as before.

In my journey of maintenance there have been days when I've failed in my goal to stay within my stated range of weight. Through poor time management, sudden change of routine or sickness I've found myself (just) over the limit I've set for myself. Rather than beat up on yourselfself; get depressed and slide into more oblivion which helps nothing the best thing you can do for yourself is just recognise the failure, learn the lesson how best to not repeat it in the future and get back on track as quickly as possible.

Thought 23Weight maintenance is an ongoing life process – there is no finishing line.

It is helpful to remember that the maintenance stage never ends. This is about lifestyle...and your lifestyle doesn’t finish until they drag your body away.

If you view it as something to obtain and stick it in your back pocket you will only set yourself up for disaster in the long run. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that once you have nailed it down then you can relax and cruise along. If you get into that relaxed thinking you will get lax and it will all slip away before you know it.

Develop the mindset that thinks of maintenance as an ongoing process in creating a healthy lifestyle that works in your life. This is about your life...and life is something you have to work at daily.

Basically one of the legacies of having gained a huge amount of weight for a long while is that your body's "set point" has been altered. The set point is the weight where your body feels most comfortable at. The body's metabolism is naturally trying to regulate itself to achieve this point. In normal people this works well enough that even though they will gain a few kilos every now and again. The body will alter it's metabolism rate so as to bring it back to normal range.

In the obese this natural process has been overwhelmed by too many calories so that it can longer cope. In the super obese (morbid) and long term overweight this "set point" has changed. The body believes the natural weight should be a great deal higher. This is why when people lose a great deal of weight they find that the body has an uncanny ability to put weight back on very rapidly. The body's "set point" is signally that it is drastically underweight so the body is reacting accordingly by pulling out all the stops to gain weight.

This is why any sort of increase of your food intake shows up on the scales with a vengeance. So you have to understand that you can't indulge in food like "normal" people do. Which is why you have to know your food intake limits and stick to it.

This is something to be very aware of in your maintenance journey. For most of us “backsliding” doesn’t just occur in one fell swoop but rather by a series of seemingly little concessions in the standards we set for ourselves. Once they are established, the combined impact of them causes what looks from the outside as sudden collapse but the reality is that the seeds of destruct were sown piece by piece.

There is an old story about an Arab in a tent. One night he sees his camel stick his nose into the tent. The Arab asks him what he is doing since camels belong outside. His camel replies, “My nose is cold. Isn’t it reasonable for me to warm it in your tent? It doesn’t take up much room.” The Arab agrees to this. The next night the camel sticks his whole head in, logically arguing that what was the use of its nose being warm if the rest of the head was cold. Each night the camel by degrees successfully convinces his owner to allow more of the camel into the tent. Finally one night the whole of the camel is in the cramp tent. The Arab complains that there isn’t enough room in the tent for both of them to sleep in it. The camel says, “You are very right! And since I’m the biggest – it is you that should get out now!” and with that the camel forces the Arab out of the tent!

Don’t settle for anything less than what you have set for yourself. Keep your standards sharp and you will not drift into disaster – or find yourself out of the tent!

Okay Josie...good to see you getting the point of the story...not! Or if you like...beware of talking camels seeking shelter in the night!

Thought 26Don’t connect eating with life’s problems.

It is hoped that by the time that you have reached maintenance stage that you have broken the habit of what is called “emotional eating”. This is the practice of linking eating with emotional highs and lows. We eat because we are depressed or feast excessively to celebrate. These responses became embedded into our lives as bad habits.

Life will always give us the full gambit of problems and highs. It is not reasonable for us to link eating with it. “Normal” people don’t do so and nor should we either. We must step up and face life squarely as adults without using food as a crouch (and perversely it is this crouch that adds to our woes).

We must face emotional eating for what it is – an excuse to avoid responsibility for our actions. A bad habit is a bad habit...and all these habits can be broken with the practice of substituting good habits for bad. It is this substitution that is the bases for us turning our lifestyle around from a poor unhealthy lifestyle that was killing us to a healthy one that gives us a better future.

In maintenance we must be watchful that this old habit does not return. Food should have no connection with the state of play of our life. It is time for us to grow up, act adult and eat like the rest of the world.

Do you know where to find successful fit people? One sure place is any sizeable stairwell. And the more fit they are - the quicker they will be climbing each set of those stairs. Why are they climbing stairs and not using elevators? Because they are fit and are committed to the idea of incidental exercise that’s why.

We all know of someone who can eat like a horse, do no exercise but never seems to put on a gram of fat. We curse them secretly and wish that we had been born with their genetically superior hyper metabolism. Although the thought that they are freaks of nature and mutants may give us cold comfort unfortunately the truth about them is less mundane.

Careful research has uncovered that these people have not been blessed with a better metabolism but burn calories continually through sustained incidental exercise. They are forever on the move from the moment they get up to the time they hit the pillow. They burn more calories during the day than other people because they move more often than most.

Research has also uncovered that most intentional exercise that people who trying to lose weight is wasted. It has been found that after an intense workouts most “recover and rest” from such activity to such an extent as to negate the calories burned, so as to make that exercise worthless.

The vast amount of calories used up by your body is just your usual day to day living. Formal exercise accounts for only a very small percentage of your daily burn. To keep your weight under control you have to make your life an active purposeful one. Being a couch potato is not an option. Keep moving and keep moving all day long is the most effective way. Be creative in finding ways to keep your butt moving the whole day long and these incidental exercises will make your maintenance road a lot easier.

There are going to be days when you get up and the very thought of exercise is going to fill you with loathing or dread. Your normal daily allotment of exercise will just seems like a bridge too far.

It would be easy just to say to yourself that one day off won’t make any difference but deep down you know that just won’t cut the mustard. It will make a difference (see thought 25). So how do you handle it?

It isn’t the exercise – it is the amount of exercise that is doing your head in. So the best way forward is to break it down into bite size chunks. That way you can work yourself into it and get it down.

For example, I usually do 90 minutes on an exercise bike. I have learnt that 90 minutes straight on an exercise bike is a big ask and I rarely do the 90 minutes in “one go” (I only do it if I’m really pressed for time). I usually break it down into three 30 minute lots and have a short break (and a towel down) in between. That is something that I can handle.

What about the days when even that seems too much? On those days I steal myself by playing the “break it down mind game”. This is a stratagem I developed when I was losing weight and continue to use in maintenance.

Let’s use the exercise bike again as an example. What I do is tell myself I can at least do some of it and commit to doing the first 30 minutes. I don’t even have to start off at my usual speed...the main thing is to get my butt on that bike and moving. Soon the legs are starting to get into it and the familiar kicks in and usually the speed increases to normal. After the first 30 minutes, I get off, towel the sweat and start telling myself that I should do at least half the normal exercise. Once on the bike I start doing the 15 minutes (half way) and then as I’m reaching that mark I remind myself that effective length of exercise is 20 minutes and that I would be wasting it if I didn’t do the extra 5 minutes. So onwards I pedal past the half way mark and as I reach the 20 minute mark I start to think that it is only another measly 10 minutes to doing two thirds of my normal exercise. Once that goal is reached and I’m resting and towelling myself off again, I start to think about the last third undone. With two thirds of it accomplished (which I thought I wouldn’t be able to do) it seems such a shame to leave the last third undone. So I get on again, promising just to do it “easy” but knowing that once I’m in the rhythm I’ll be giving it my all until it is achieved.

By breaking it down, the journey up the mountain isn’t so tough. Just make it about one step at a time...and that each of those steps will get you to where you want to go.